Talk:A Royal Problem/@comment-27578467-20170719041327/@comment-27578467-20180218190534
Yes well... I owed you one for putting all those episodes on dailymotion/google drive, which is what I watched when I first got into the series. And yes I do mean that comment, the one about the pancakes. Admittedly it's been more than a decade since I lived with any of my siblings. I do live with roommates but it's certainly not a sibling dynamic, so my firsthand experience may not be reliable here on the sibling front. The thing is, I don't really place their relationship in the same camp as the one I had with my siblings, seeing as they only have to interact for a few hours at most every day, have an entire palace worth of personal space, and are fully grown and providing for their needs. And this is setting aside the fantastic elements to their relationship, like how long they've lived and the fact that one was banished for a thousand years, which would make it all quite inaccessible. More to the point, however, is that much of their behavior is nothing short of textbook adolescent. Celestia's irritated dismissal of Starlight's suggestion is analogous to coping with criticism by openly discrediting the source rather than, as a mature adult would do, either taking the reproach to heart or silently recognizing that it is misinformed. Maybe I wrongly attributed adult maturity to her character from her behavior in the first five seasons, but in my opinion it was one of her more pronounced and relatable traits. And as I said before I think it fit very naturally into her character; again, without reading too much into it, one thousand years is a long time to observe human (er, pony) nature and learn to adapt to fit your goals, which in this case would probably involve a lot of negotiation and conflict resolution. In other words, it does not compute to watch a character who has presumably had much more experience than me (and who has demonstrated such) suddenly behave like someone half my age; to me that's a clear indication of the writer thoughtlessly bending the character to fit a predetermined form, much like the rhyme bending I mentioned on the Open Up Your Eyes page. It seems you're right about her only having to raise the moon, but I'd wager she started talking to herself pretty soon after banishing her sister, especially if it only took her one evening to start as it did in this episode. I suppose you could argue then that she does it out of habit, but it seems to me that they wanted it to appear like it was a new thing for her altogether, which in my brain, as I enjoy saying, does not compute. For me the show is best set up for comedy, which is why I don't fault it for having fewer emotional moments in the earlier seasons... though I should say something like 'directly' emotional moments, since because I tend to passively relate to characters a bit more in earlier episodes, the emotional attachment is often more indirect and persistent - like sympathizing with Pinkie in A Party of One or with Twilight in A Canterlot Wedding. But though episodes like Sleepless in Ponyville and Sisterhooves Social really get me, I'd agree that something like Crusaders of the Lost Mark is certainly the result of a more... I suppose developed product. And yes, I agree the accordion entrance in Amending Fences was spot on, perhaps even more poignant than the piano accompaniment during the silent film bit at the end of A Friend in Deed, though as per my own personal experience I related more with the resolution scene in AFiD. Also, though I find Twilight's fretting over Starlight to be a stark regression of her emotional stability, I do appreciate starlight getting annoyed with it. As I said, I tend to relate with her more nowadays because I feel like I'm still getting a sense of the post S05 world.